Preface

Why this book? Although a Google search may show a fair number of books about AIX, including a couple about performance tuning, just about all of them are at least a decade old. IBM provides a tremendous amount of information through its portals and Redbooks, but it is not unusual for administrators seeking to tune their boxes to examine dozens of Web sites and Redbooks before finding the information they need. This book brings it all together for you, and more. Further, I review best practices and provide tips and tricks that are not usually covered in the IBM literature. Last, the book provides an impartial view (I don't work for IBM) of systems performance tuning based on the real-world experiences of a battle-scarred systems administration veteran.

This book is intended for systems professionals who need to understand, monitor, and control the factors that affect AIX performance on their IBM POWER servers. It also includes bonus chapters on the recent innovations of AIX 6.1, Linux on Power (LoP) performance, and running Oracle on AIX.

This is an intermediate book about AIX performance analysis and systems tuning. The material comes both from IBM sources and from real life, based on my experiences as a Unix professional supporting production systems for more than 20 years (almost half of them on AIX), in many capacities and for a broad range of industries.

Because this book is not an introduction to Unix, prior knowledge of Unix (and AIX in particular) is recommended, although I would not say it is a prerequisite. The book covers tuning methodology, systems monitoring, and performance tuning on all subsystems, including CPU, RAM, and I/O (network and disk). As an introduction, I review time-tested tuning and analysis methodology, steps that will assist you throughout the tuning lifecycle.

The monitoring sections describe tools that will let you immediately gain a foothold (taking quick-and-dirty snapshots on the health of the system) on your system. They also discuss tools that will help you collect historic data for the purpose of analyzing trends and results. All the tools used in this book either are part of the standard IBM AIX systems build or are open-source products written by folks who work for IBM (e.g., nmon) and used widely in the field of battle.

—Ken Milberg

August 2009